Disclaimer:
This will be a rather long post, so do bear with me. Firstly this isn’t an iQuit, iRant or iShowoff kind of post. What this post seeks is to offer my observations on the current Tree of Savior Rank8 (iToS:R8) patch, some things which I found out over the course of gaming in MMOs and other game genres, how the concepts come about and what kind of solutions can be proposed to tackle the challenges found in iToS:R8. As I’m no expert in this field (just a regular gamer with a 9-5, unrelated job), do feel free to expand and improve on the ideas or correct and propose alternative solutions . Hopefully what is collectively done here can be seen by the developers of the game and they can bring some insights out from this to improve the game.
Some background info:
I’m a semi-hardcore, non-competitive player for ToS. Currently at time of writing I’ve spent 2.1k hours playing iToS, have 9 characters ranging from levels 120s to 310s with most of them mid rank 7 and 2 which are rank 8. I do love spending time in analysing things, how they work and the concepts behind, hence most of my posts in forums are suggestions and ideas.
Difficulty spike, game pacing and enjoyment
Before we touch on the iToS:R8 balance we will need to talk about balancing in general for games, especially games in the action-RPG and MMO genre, since ToS is basically these 2 genres mashed together. In ARPGs, a player overpowers his/her adversaries by hitting them for a number of successful attacks. How games balance skills across each other can be simplified as the number of hits need to dispatch the target, the speed in which those hits are dealt, the method in delivering the hits to the target and the resources needed to perform the hit. It is these 4 that make up the fundamentals of each and every skill and how they interact with the target.
Supposedly we have skill A, in which we consider as a default, balanced skill. Against a monster Z the player would have to use A 20 times to dispatch it. So once we have this as a median, we can create other skills such as skill B, which is of higher power and can kill off the same monster in 10 hits, or skill C which is weaker and takes 30 applications of it to get rid of monster Z. Then, in order to balance these skills to each other, other values such as speed of delivery and resource consumption will be tweaked. Like skill B requires a large consumption of resources and skill C dealing hits more swiftly.
So projected in game terms, it might be monster Z has 100k hp and skill A does 5k damage each, so 20hits of 5k will dispatch off monster Z.
So far this is the basic blocks on how skills are formed and balanced, without touching on the reverse, which is mitigation of hits. In order to keep games fresh and interesting, we can’t keep having the same kind of monster Z all over the place, players will get sick of them. So, like skills themselves, monsters each have variations to simulate different challenges to the player. Some monsters will have more mitigation, some equipped with skills themselves to attempt to thwart the player from dealing the hit successfully. In short, different monster variants will present different type of challenges and ‘difficulty’ to the player.
This is where it becomes interesting, we all know that mitigation in MMOARPGs comes in 3 forms:
- Mitigation in increasing the constitution of the monster (HP increase)
- Mitigation in increasing the toughness of the monster (defence increase)
- Mitigation in controlling the chance of success in which the player’s hit will connect (crowd control skills, dodge/block skills etc)
In the monster Z situation increasing only the constitution for monster by 2x will make the player require 40 hits to kill it. Increasing the toughness of monster by 2x will also make the player require 2 times more effort to kill it, since damage dealt is halved. This is what most of the MMOs out there do, in order to raise the “difficulty”, they increase the hp and defense of the monsters, but most of the time the increment is gradual and is only on one of the forms.
So what happens when we increase both of the 1st 2 forms of mitigation without any increment of the player’s ability to deal more damage? If monster Z now has:
200k hp + 2x def… skill A deals 2500 instead of 5000, will take 80 applications of skill A to kill the monster.
What if the monster has 400k hp and 10x the def?
400k hp + 10x def… skill A deals 500 instead of 5000. 800 applications just to kill 1 monster Z.
Will the player even stay there to apply 800 applications of a skill just to kill a monster? Common sense tells us no, the difficulty spike is too high. The player will need to have some sort of measure to increase their damage output to match the monster’s increase in toughness.
There is something which I called “pace of the game” (It might have an official term somewhere but I don’t know what is it. Let’s just call it this). As we can see, game when broken down to the core, is essentially a time sink in which players invest their time (and sometimes money) to trade for enjoyment. A player may have traded X amount of time to get Y return of enjoyment back. Games which are really engaging and addictive gives players the illusion of getting more enjoyment vs the amount of time they expect to trade in. Vice versa, players will feel bored when they invest X+ amount of time but only get back Y- amount of enjoyment.
So why is this “game pace” related to balancing and monster toughness? Players get enjoyment in games by accomplishing things, be it watching their avatar grow stronger, beating a hard to beat dungeon/quest or besting peers in duels etc. Being able to overcome a hard and difficult challenge makes the player feel good, and will continue to seek out such thrills in game. A good game will constantly throw out these increasingly difficult challenges and yet keep these still within the player’s reach, so that the player can get the joy of feeling accomplished after besting these maps and quests. When the challenge is too tough, the game throws out some form of aid to the player which can guide him or her back on track.
This aid can be in the form of common items which helps the player in accomplishing their challenges easier. A good instance of this is in World of Warcraft, where every new expansion comes out, players gear and stats become vastly outgeared by the new monsters. What the WoW developers do? They introduce many common gears in which the players can acquire during their journey into the new patch’s difficulty and challenges. These gears, although are still weak compared to the new end game gears, serve as a jumping board for players to use to get used to the new challenges and difficulty levels. This allows the devs to raise the bar of difficulty level, yet still maintain the pacing of the game to make the player feel that their time spent on the game product is worth it.
Balancing in ToS:R8
Back to iToS:R8, what is observed is the huge difficulty spike in monsters, both in overall toughness and constitution. We have monsters with huge hp pools up to 500k+ and with magical defenses up to thousands. Just like the monster Z example above, a regular player would have to increase his or her skill output by a lot more just to tackle these monsters, yet the returns (of enjoyment) back is still the same.
Fact is, all players like to see progression in their own avatars, which they painstakingly spent hours of their time (amd perhaps money) working on. They want to see their character, while on the quest of getting stronger, is able to dish out more damage and survive longer. Progression to them is seeing ever increasing amount of damage in numbers, which is a tool they use to guage how well they do. This is also why most games with damage numbers will keep on increasing till the millions. They give a sense of progression to the players.
So if increasing damage is progression, how about decreased damage? How will a player perceive his character when he sees that the damage dealt is a mere fraction of what he deals previously? Regression of character? Build and play is wrong? It gives off a negative vibe to the player, making him doubt whether his choices in game is correct or not. This is perhaps the reason why most games gives priority to increasing hp pools of monsters over increasing the toughness of monsters. It generates the feeling of
“Hey this monster is so hard, have such a huge pool of hp. But I’m doing more damage than before, I might be able to just clear it.”
In R7 swordsman don’t deal as much damage as their magic counterparts, but they do increasingly more damage as they progress through the game. In R8, the magic classes get the reverse. Due to implementation of tougher monsters with more constitution, magic classes are dealing lesser damage then before while still have to face the daunting, ever growing hp pools. Personally this isn’t really ideal if the game is to be balanced for party play with a good mixture of physical and magic classes. It just kills the play experiences of magic classes outright.
So what can the game (or rather devs) do to achieve this good party mixture without ruining play experiences?
First and foremost is to balance the ratio between monster toughness and constitution, so that players, no matter physical or magical builds, will still dish the same or more damage to the monsters before the difficulty spike. Remember in the beginning of the post I mentioned about 3 forms of damage mitigation? The last form is to control the success of in which the player will successfully hit the monster.
Crowd control form of mitigation have to be used sparingly, since wrestling control of the player’s avatar ruins player experience. No one likes to sit there unable to do anything. So the best way to provide more challenge is to introduce dodge/block skills to monsters. Give monsters situational missile holes, golden bell shields and ausrine invulnerability that lasts up to 3 secs max. In this way it generates a more dynamic way for players to engage monsters, where players have to watch when and where to start dpsing in order to clear the monsters more efficiently.
Next, introduce more common tiered items to help players whom are struggling with their damage. Pre R8 it works out pretty well with players using weapons such as superior corona rods, superior wreech bow etc to help them progress in 240+ content. Now R8 is released and we do need common tiered items such as these.
